Yeah, I once infected a company's accounting system with a penny shaving virus that transferred the money into my bank account, but like an idiot I misplaced a decimal point so the account balance grew way too fast. Luckily one of my co-workers burned the company building down, destroying the evidence.

Or did i see that in a movie...

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Of course not, we're all perfect. I've never done anything lame like fat-finger an entry in web.xml and bring the app to it's knees. No, never.

Seriously though, don't be so hard on yourself. It's all part of the learning process. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes as long as you learn something from them. Now, making the same mistakes over and over, that's another issue entirely.

Someone once said that good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from poor decisions. Hang in there.

"The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do." -- Ted Nelson

Seriously though, don't be so hard on yourself. It's all part of the learning process. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes as long as you learn something from them. Now, making the same mistakes over and over, that's another issue entirely.

Someone once said that good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from poor decisions. Hang in there.

I jinxed myself. I just did it again. Added a new context listener but forgot a dependent jar file. It's unnerving when you get a 404 on your home page. See what I mean?

So what have I learned? That I need to write ANT scripts for deployment and stop depending on my aging memory to recall all the files needed for any given enhancement. And so the journey continues.....

Jk Robbins wrote:So what have I learned? That I need to write ANT scripts for deployment and stop depending on my aging memory to recall all the files needed for any given enhancement. And so the journey continues.....

Humans are terrible at remembering little things. Write the ant/mvn/... sript, check it in with the sources into git/svn/csv and let the computer remember it forever.

nir sharma wrote:You made a mistake while "Maaking" this thread also (I hope it was intentional).

Damn it was not intentional. Looks like its not my day.

Lexington Smith
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Joined: Sep 29, 2012
Posts: 67

posted Oct 16, 2012 10:58:33

0

Jelle Klap wrote:Yeah, I once infected a company's accounting system with a penny shaving virus that transferred the money into my bank account, but like an idiot I misplaced a decimal point so the account balance grew way too fast. Luckily one of my co-workers burned the company building down, destroying the evidence.

Jelle Klap wrote:Yeah, I once infected a company's accounting system with a penny shaving virus that transferred the money into my bank account, but like an idiot I misplaced a decimal point so the account balance grew way too fast. Luckily one of my co-workers burned the company building down, destroying the evidence.

Or did i see that in a movie...

Which movie ?

Any IT worker who does not recognize this as a reference to the movie Office Space should consider that movie required viewing. Highly recommended.

Jelle Klap wrote:Yeah, I once infected a company's accounting system with a penny shaving virus that transferred the money into my bank account, but like an idiot I misplaced a decimal point so the account balance grew way too fast. Luckily one of my co-workers burned the company building down, destroying the evidence.

Or did i see that in a movie...

Which movie ?

Any IT worker who does not recognize this as a reference to the movie Office Space should consider that movie required viewing. Highly recommended.

I also did the exact same thing with the payroll system -- except I transfered all the partial pennies to my paycheck (the rounding errors that nobody should have noticed). I would have gotten away with it too, but I accidentally drove to work in a Ferrari.

Note: this reference comes from a horrible movie, so extra points (or my condolences) if you recognize the reference ...

I'm sure if there was a thread entitled "What's the stupidest thing you ever did in your computing career?" you would get a lot of interesting stories. In fact I think there might already have been a thread like that.

Mike Simmons
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Joined: Mar 05, 2008
Posts: 3028

10

posted Oct 16, 2012 12:29:18

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Henry Wong wrote:Note: this reference comes from a horrible movie, so extra points (or my condolences) if you recognize the reference ...

I never saw this movie myself, but as characters in Office Space note:

Peter: "This sounds familiar."
Michael: "Yeah, they did it in Superman III."
Peter: "Right."
Michael: "Yeah. Underrated movie, actually. And then there were a bunch of hackers, did it in the '70s as well. One of them got busted."

Mike Simmons wrote:I never saw this movie myself, but as characters in Office Space note:

Peter: "This sounds familiar."
Michael: "Yeah, they did it in Superman III."
Peter: "Right."
Michael: "Yeah. Underrated movie, actually. And then there were a bunch of hackers, did it in the '70s as well. One of them got busted."

I should be so lucky. Two scenes are still are stuck in my head, even after all these years...

In the first, Richard Pryor's character types "list" at the BASIC prompt, and the computer then... well ... lists the program. And while this program (which is mostly REM statements) is listing, the instructor is astonished -- and even comments something like "how the heck are you doing that?"...

In the second, Pryor's character is trying to break into the payroll system. The system prompts for the password, to which he types something like "override security", and a bunch of random characters appears followed by a prompt on where to transfer the money...

And of course, I am not counting on how a computer, which is designed on a napkin, can become self aware, and modify itself to create a kryptonite beam weapon.

That sort of thing is so incredibly annoying. It really keeps me from enjoying movies some times. I just can't suspend my disbelief when it comes to stuff like this. For instance, yesterday Swordfish aired and I knew it was going to annoy the heck out of me, because I had seen it before. I forgot how it started though, which as it turns out is with a highly ironic monologue by John Travolta's character:

You know what the problem with Hollywood is? They make shit. Unbelievable, unremarkable shit. Now I'm not some grungy wannabe filmmaker that's searching for existentialism through a haze of bong smoke or something. No, it's easy to pick apart bad acting, short-sighted directing, and a purely moronic stringing together of words that many of the studios term as "prose". No, I'm talking about the lack of realism. Realism; not a pervasive element in today's modern American cinematic vision.

After smiling at that I just turned on my PS3 and played Dishonored instead.

Jelle Klap wrote:Yeah, I once infected a company's accounting system with a penny shaving virus that transferred the money into my bank account, but like an idiot I misplaced a decimal point so the account balance grew way too fast. Luckily one of my co-workers burned the company building down, destroying the evidence.

My team gets the payroll file from our HR software and sends it to the bank for processing.

My plan it so put in a script that subtracts $1 from every employee's check. Then I'd take that amount and increase the deposits for everyone on my team.

In the end everything balances, making it harder to detect. Few if anyone would notice a missing dollar from their check. Plus, since we don't have version control and we all use the same login ID, they would have a hard time proving it was me (which is why I would distribute it to everyone on my team. With 27,000 employees, that would add up pretty fast.

There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors

Pat Farrell wrote:Humans have a genetic quirk that prevents them from realizing these types of mistakes until after the commit.

It can be troublesome either way. With a really big table, the rollback could take hours; and the application(s) could be unusable for that time....

Some years ago one of our customer's admin was about to refresh a test schema. He was connected to production instead of test database and dropped the production schema. The customer's DBAs were preparing to switch to a new database at that time and didn't have regular backups (or so I was told). They had to roll forward some 90 days from redo logs; all in all it took three days during which the application was down.

And this was mine: our app required a new database role to be created (we provide upgrade scripts, but we can't create roles in them -- no privileges). The role was created in test, but not in production (this was a mistake, but not mine). The application passed tests and was to be deployed to prod, but the upgrade scripts failed; we scrambled to fix it up. I was instructed to remove the dependency on the role from the upgrade scripts, but forgot (yes, this is the lame mistake). So when another version was being deployed to prod some weeks later, it failed again. It wouldn't be very noteworthy, except that I was on an excursion at an airport exactly at the time the application was being upgraded. I was stuck in the middle of an unused runway in an airport bus I could not leave (for security reasons), airplanes were taking on and off nearby, and I had one of our customer's technicians on the line, whom I could barely hear over the noise. I was texting him instructions, including some SQL queries (locating all these brackets, equals and semicolons on the phone was a real joy )

Henry Wong wrote:And of course, I am not counting on how a computer, which is designed on a napkin, can become self aware, and modify itself to create a kryptonite beam weapon.

Has anyone else seen the Australian film "The Bank"? It's actually a serious drama, but it plays an elegant joke with the Hollywood writer's fantasy that complex logical processes can be doodled on a napkin.

That sort of thing is so incredibly annoying. It really keeps me from enjoying movies some times.

Has anyone seen "Runaway" with Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons? I haven't seen it in quite some time, but I recall being reasonably impressed with the way robots are integrated into that hypothetical society.